Life at 7,000 feet: the Colorado Plateau

Saturday (Aug 13)

Well darn! It was clear enough to see Cassiopeia when I went to bed, and it clear enough to overheat the van this morning, but when I got up at 1:30 am to see the Perseid meteor shower it was completely overcast. No luck. The amazing lightning show in the distance was still going on, but not an inch of clear sky.

Enjoying a very pleasant morning here. SOOO happy to be out of the humidity, although my body still feels like it is adjusting. 70’s and a pleasant breeze miles and miles of flat open space then mountains in every direction. I am feeling the itchy head syndrome, a clear sign that I should shower. I decide to adjust my plan to go to a state park with shower tonight rather than the state park without shower.

The first town of any size is Cimarron NM. Both places Yelp listed did not seem to exist, but the Mexican restaurant I did go to turned out quite nicely. It was half country people and half … LA people for lack of a better term.  Glamourous moms in swishy outfits, a grubby dude and his babe, but the grubby dude’s hair was just so, like he was ready for his casting call to be an introspective cowboy tomorrow!

Today’s drive through the New Mexico mountains was quite beautiful. Drove past a state park that looked real nice … but doesn’t have showers. If I had the day to do over I would have stopped here and washed my hair in a tub. But I had a goal – a different state park south of here – so I headed on over the pass and into the wide valley of Eagle Nest Lake and through the towns of Eagle Nest and Angel Fire. Don’t those names just sound expensive? Both appear to be swishy ski getaways. Driving south towards my campground there were huge homes and fancy condos and golf courses for miles.

Then the road took a right turn down a canyon and everything went downscale very quickly. Narrow, curvy, and bumpy. So narrow they stopped painting a midline stripe. It was also unmarked for many miles, to the point that I was starting to worry that I missed a turn somewhere. I have little confidence because I did miss the right turn 30 miles ago, but then I had phone reception to pull up a map, so it was easily detected and corrected. No phone reception at all down here, so I am flying blind so to speak. Eventually my dark and narrow road opened up into a little valley and some traces of civilization appeared, and in the first place wide enough to put anything it was my campground.

My determination to get a shower today led me into a little bit of bad decision making, so here I am up a holler in the hills of New Mexico. Well-showered and not unhappy, but parked in the overflow lot of a sorry little state campground that is full to the gills with Saturday night fishing families … who keep tromping past my van to and from the bathroom.

 

Sunday

Well, on a sunny Sunday morning it’s not such a sorry place, really! I think everyone was beaten down by the downpour (hailstorm!) right before I arrived last night. This morning the place is alive with children and fishermen puttering around in the little stream that runs through the place, getting one more crack at it before vacation is over and they have to load up the pickup truck and return to regular life.. The huge family at the campground junction had three cars worth of people milling around one moment, then I the next time I looked that way all three cars were gone!  Not a trace. Pretty efficient they were … and very tidy! None of the random soda cans and food wrappers that big groups often leave, so good for them.

By noon most of my neighbors have left, but a couple of big rigs have lumbered past heading in; arriving early to get a good spot for what I imagine will be their week-long stay.  My new take is that this NOT a dull, shabby place, rather it is fisherman’s heaven, with a nice trout stream complete with on-property beaver dams running right through the campground.

It’s so nice and quiet now with all the weekenders gone I could stay a while, but it’s time for me to get going also. 25 minutes down the road I’m enjoying a nice rendition of chorizo con huevos in the remote little town of Mora.

New Mexico is such a distinct place. The culture is Mexican to it’s core but has also been American for longer than the country has existed, not to mention Pueblo, Hopi, Ute and all manner of Native cultures. In a way that I find strangely analogous to overseas travel, the food is very good here in general.

Thence to spend the day in Taos. No wifi yet, so I head straight to Wired, a very odd rambling, shambling coffee place on my way into town. Then I drive up a few miles up US 64 to scope out where I will camp tonight. Then back through through town and up NM 150 to see if I could find where my Autodesk friend Iived when I visited in … 1995? I found the area but could not find the house. Heck, I can’t even remember the woman’s name now…

Since I know where I’m spending the night I can enjoy Taos till dark. I eat at a nice brewery downtown – a really tasty catfish po’ boy and a couple of beers. Walked off the beers and enjoyed an excellent sunset, then back to ….

Arrive with a little bit of daylight left, find a private and nearly level site. No drinking tonight (did that already!), so I fix myself some decaf tea and hang out and look at the waxing gibbous moon. I have not been getting the enjoyment I usually do out of the waxing moon on a trip. Poor weather and non-conducive camping choices I think.

Monday

Not much of a stay. Park at dusk, get up in the morning and drive back to town. Nonetheless I am grateful that it’s here, for just that reason.

Today’s hip coffee place is Elevation. Yesterday’s spot – Wired – was 90’s music – Foo Fighters, Chli Peppers, Soundgarden. Today is 70’s funk time! Lots of Parliament Funkadelic, a very ggod thing in my book. Two ways to look at this:

1. I am two for two on my favorite genres. I enjoyed almost every song … so this is my kind of town!
2. On the other hand, there hasn’t been  a whiff of a song made since 1998. I am in a boomer town turned into itself.

Really tasty chile verde at a big busy Mexican restaurant, then a coupla hours at the Taos Public Library. See a different slice of Taos life. Last time I did this was in Oklahoma City, I really enjoyed it then also.

Time to go, fill up on diesel, head out west on US 64 towards Pagosa Springs.

I hadn’t really planned to stop, but almost every car was pulling over to check out the very dramatic Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, so I did the same. Glad I did, it was really a nice stop! The canyon is very dramatic, a 800′ deep gash in the flat, featureless lava plain. The bridge has wide sidewalks and even an extended viewing platform in the middle, on both sides. The other excitement was Mountain Sheep hanging out in the shadows at the upper edge of the canyon, maybe 80′ from the edge of the bridge. I am glad other people had noticed them, I’m not sure I would have spotted them, so well did they blend with the dusty rocks.

Back on the road, heading to the only campground in my path between here and Colorado.

In my research this place looked really dull, a loop of campsites at a little lake. I only came this way out of lack of a better alternative. But it turned out to be a highlight of the trip! It’s at 9,500 feet! There are aspen trees! dramatic clouds!

I took a little hike through the meadow and down the hill. It was was picture perfect. At this altitude the wildflowers are still going nuts! Yellow ones and blue ones and white ones and lavender and purple and red ones. Oh and aspens and perfectly formed conifers. And a 8-point stag and his doe. And two 30′ towers with solar panels at the top, in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason.

The only fly in this edenlike ointment(!) is the fucking jerk at the edge of the campground running his unshielded generator. I know from Burning Man that it modern generators can be relatively quiet, and also that there is lots of technology for noise baffling. Not for this a-hole. He’s got a 3′ long machine in the line of sight (i.e. line of noise) from the rest of us, clanking along ever since I got here. I moved from the site I registered for to one 150 yards further away and I can still hear it. Asshole. If it wasn’t so perfectly quiet otherwise it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Ah but what a great evening! My new site has a perfectly unobstructed sunset view from the picnic table, where I am now typing this.

Tuesday

Everything about this place – except the generator noise –  is so perfect it’s like a dream. The temperature is my perfect temperature. The ground is not too dusty, not too muddy, not too gravelly, so my van doesn’t get untidy. As mentioned above, the Universe has strewn wildflowers everywhere to celebrate my arrival. Pretty hard to leave :)

On my way out I drive down the hill to the lake. There’s a few hardy fisher-people lining the edges. There is no boat ramp and no boats. There have been some impressive thunderheads building in the east and the occasional distant thunder, so many of them are making their way around the lake to at least be near their cars when it breaks.

I should have eaten some kind of breakfast at the van. But it’s only a half hour to Chama where Yelp showed a couple of likely spots so I didn’t. But Yelp let me down today, Chama was a FAIL. I found the restaurant but it’s closed today and tomorrow for annual cleanup (really?). The Christian coffee shop appears to not exist at all. This is a problem I have with Yelp all too often – planning a half-day around a place 50 miles away that turns out to not exist or not be findable or not be open. Oh well…

I pull over on a wide shoulder with a pretty view and adjourn to my dining area – i.e. open the van door and sit on my cooler, and snarf down some cold chili verde from yesterday to tide me over to Pagosa Springs. Cold Mexican dinner isn’t my idea of fine living, but it was still pretty tasty and served it’s function of staving off the low blood sugar yips quite well.

Yelp was right on in Pagosa, the Pagosa Bakery still exists and is still really good. I had coffee and a slice of pecan pie WITH whipped cream, so I was livin’ large!

I did NOT go to the hot springs – one of my favorite places in the world!  It’s very expensive, and there are no good ways to stay here cheaply, and I had a bad experience catching a gut thing here last time, and I am finally running out of time before I see Peggy, so I just punted on what is really the only reason to be in Pagosa Springs anyway! I went to the healthy food place, then the City Market and the liquor store on the way out of town. As always I found Pagosa kind of tiring and jangling on the nerves, for whatever reason.

I nailed down one of the few level spots in this place, paid my fee, set up my hammock and chilled for a while. It has been three days since that shower I worked so hard for on Saturday, so I myself off the hammock for one of those back of the van showers, to be deployed only in dire need.

I’m getting better at it, because I did it pretty quickly and didn’t use too much water.  As I was inside changing into dry clothes a dusty car drove past. There’s a dirt road out the back of the campground that I hadn’t even noticed. Ten minutes earlier they would’ve been treated to the sight of me pouring water down my privates!

Two cars arrived late, one right before sunset,one considerably after. The second set up right across from me and made quite a todo till bedtime.